Do you remember? Mom was working nights and we spent the whole day after work going shopping for Christmas dinner. We bought dough for the desserts, and sugar for the toppings, and eggs, and milk. And mom carried most of it, because I was still small. My cheeks stung from the cold and I remember that you started screaming at her as soon as we came home. And then you kicked us out of the house.

Then we were in a bus heading to my aunt’s house. I can’t quite tell if this is the same incident or a separate one. In my memories, there is a cloud—a sort of ethereal ectoplasm of sun and warmth—that surrounds mom and I on the bus, so it was probably summer already. The driver kept looking at mom because she was crying so hard.

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